Writing Discussion 5

[kriadydragon]

They're ba-ack!

If anyone is curious as to why I haven't touched on some of the suggested topics it's because some of the topics are rather fanfic centered and I want the discussions to be centered around both fanfic and original fic.

Tonight's topic is on wording, word choices and using words in a way that makes your story flow and holds your reader's interest.

I start with this question: Have you ever read a story that A) even though it was well written, interesting, the content superb and agreeable, something about the story still managed to give you a headache or B) have you ever read a story that though well written and interesting, made your mind wander more often than not and you wished the author would - to put it bluntly - shut up already? I just finished a book not too long ago that actually did both. Though it was good, it just kept going and going and going... yes, the plants have special powers, we get that already. To quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Get on with it!

And also this question: have you ever stopped reading a story for something as trivial as, say, the author's choice of words? I have. I believe it was because of the gratuitous use of the word giggle. I don't trust stories written by people who actually think grown men giggle, and said men are neither drunk, drugged, insane or ten years old.

Now on to the topic question - how the heck to avoid all the above mentioned pitfalls?

Comments

[sholio]

Another thing that I find very useful, if there's something I'm specifically struggling with, is to look at the mechanics of how a favorite writer handles it. For example, if I'm worried that I'm over-using the word "said", I might pick a writer whose books I like, and see how they handle dialogue attribution in their dialogue scenes. If they use a lot of "saids" and I never even noticed, then I guess I shouldn't worry too much about over-using it in my own dialogue!

One recent example of this sort of thing is that I'd gotten concerned about overusing the "there was" construction in my scene descriptions. ("There was a brilliant sunset in the western sky", etc.) In an attempt to avoid it, I would use convoluted and rather strained sentences ("A brilliant sunset flushed the sky") but when I went and looked at scene descriptions in books I'd recently read, it turned out that it was often used and not at all noticeable, so I stopped worrying about it so much.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Another thing that I find very useful, if there's something I'm specifically struggling with, is to look at the mechanics of how a favorite writer handles it.

Oh, that's a good one. I've actually found myself doing this quite often, lately; asking myself "okay, so how would so-and-so author go about doing this?" I also do the reverse, look at books I didn't enjoy or enjoyed but found hard to read to know what not to do. Like the story I mentioned in my example. The story was good but, man, the author rambled, and that's something I'm personally not a fan of (I say "personally" since, like you mentioned, there may be some who do like it. But as authors, what we write is usually what we want to read and the way we want to read it).